A well-anchored shelf will prevent all of your games from crashing down and injuring your child.
If you are to do only one thing to baby proof your board game shelf, it’s anchoring it to the wall correctly. My Homebrew Solution Using Banister Netting.Protecting Your Board Game Collection from Young Children.“And after it’s stronger, it should be mandatory. “The voluntary stability standard companies can choose whether or not to follow right now needs to be stronger,” she says. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates consumer goods in the U.S., has guidelines for designing chests that don’t tip easily, but they’re voluntary, so manufacturers decide whether or not to follow them. “Ideally, everyone should be strapping their furniture to the wall, but that’s not going to happen,” Lisa Seifert of Shane’s Foundation says, arguing instead the stability of furniture should be better regulated. Ikea did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether or not they would be using them.) (Kids In Danger passed Segal’s tip-safe dresser designs along to Ikea. Ikea has said in the wake of the recall that it will be making design changes to its dresser line, though it has not discussed specifics. None of these designs are production-ready yet, but they could be–something Ikea, as the world’s largest furniture retailer, is perhaps better positioned to tackle than anyone else. This not only gives the TipStop fewer drawers which can be pulled out to create a tipping hazard, but Harman says it also encourages kids to put things away, since their research showed that kids were less likely to put toys away in drawers instead of cubbies.
This, in turn, is supplemented by replacing the second drawer with a couple of cubbies. “From interviewing parents, we heard what they really wanted was a bunch of different storage types.” Instead of a bottom drawer, the TipStop has a built-in toy chest, which increases the unit’s stability. “We really didn’t want our design to be too wild,” says Hartman. “The idea was if they could design something that met Ikea’s standards, they’d learn to understand other clients as well.”ĭesigned by Jethro Au, Katherine Hartman, Ethan Park, and Giovanna Varalta Ciavolella, the Stable Storage system is another one–like the TipStop Dresser–with built-in extensions to prevent the drawers from triggering a full-on dresser collapse. “We’re trying to get students ready for the real world,” he says. On hand to advise the students were Cowles and Lisa Siefert of Shane’s Foundation, an advocacy group founded upon Siefert’s two-year old son, Shane, who died in a tip-over accident.įinally, Herbst told his students that aesthetically, each dresser needed to look like something Ikea might sell, and have the same emotional design language. Cowles felt like there had to be some way to make furniture tip-resistant–beyond attaching it to a wall.Ĭowles made the suggestion to Herbst, who loved the idea, and told his students to design something that would cost less than $200 to build, but which could support 50 pounds of weight on each drawer. This time, her tragic inspiration was the news of a child dying after an Ikea dresser tipped over. Many of the design thinking problems that Herbst’s students work on are suggested by Nancy Cowles, the executive director of the children’s product safety organization Kids In Danger. “A lot of these students come to the school effectively having been told for 18 years there’s only one design solution to every problem,” Herbst says. The ChallengeĮvery fall at Segal, as part of the Design Thinking and Communications course taught by Walter Herbst, students are assigned to tackle a real-world problem. These four designs suggest that what Ikea says is an “industry” problem to solve is actually something individual designers thinking outside of the box can solve on their own.
The dressers were designed with the requirements that it not tip over when 50 pounds of downward pressure were applied to any given shelf, have similar storage size to standard dressers, have a low manufacturing cost (less than $200), and be capable of shipping flat–just like Ikea dressers. Is that actually true? Last year, a team of Northwestern Engineering students at the university’s Segal Institute of Design was tasked with modifying the design of a freestanding Ikea Malm dresser so that it couldn’t tip over if a child climbed on it.